Curriculum Vitæ: a working life story, Chapter 21: “Why should we hire you?”

[Previous chapter] [Toilet Rolls: December 2013 – May 2014]

In October 2013, Ad Agency # 1—by far my least favourite of the two Ad Agencies at which I’d worked In-House—contacted The Headhunter who’d headhunted me for The Hot Chocolate Job back in March, and asked him to headhunt somebody to Work on community management for the Facebook pages of not one but two of The UK’s Major Toilet Roll Brands. Because he already knew me, and I was obviously The Natural Choice for this Job, it was probably the easiest headhunting Job of his Life.

Communications went back and forth in the weeks leading up to Child # 2’s birth. None of the Staff involved were my Colleagues from April, all of whom had since left Ad Agency # 1. A woman with a frankly baffling Job Title sent an email to The Good Recruiter on the day of Child # 2’s birth, which he forwarded to me the day after, asking if I could officially start Work on The Toilet Rolls Job next Monday. I confirmed that I could, at a rate of £250 a day—two steps down from my £260 a day in April and £270 in September; but worth it, I reasoned, because I was assured I could Work From Home for the majority of the Time, and would not have to travel to The Great Wen, sleep in my father’s spare room, or watch any episodes of “The Big Bang Theory” as part of the arrangement.

The role

I’ve already explained the process of maintaining Brand Facebook Pages a couple of times in this CV, Prospective Employer—doing my bit, so I imagine, for the early-21st Century social historians of tomorrow. And although Facebook was (and presumably still is) in a process of Continuous Improvement in its Quest to Monetize the Resource of Time extracted from as much Human Life as possible, little was truly different about Facebook as I found it in December 2013 from when I first started using it (at The Boutique Agency) to feed and clothe myself back in 2008—only that now even Toilet Roll Brands had their own Pages, and thus People Like Me were Paid to maintain them.

The integrity of the Companies I’ve Worked for and their Clients is sacred to me, Prospective Employer, which is why I never identify them by name. So when I say that Toilet Roll Brand # 1—the more popular of the two—featured a cuddly animal mascot that wasn’t a dog, I hope you can satisfy yourself by picturing the type of Toilet Roll Brand it was, rather than actually Googling it, or anything Invasive like that. The other Toilet Roll Brand I was responsible for, I’ll call Toilet Roll Brand # 2 (no jokes please, Prospective Employer; this concerns Jobs: serious Jobs; big Jobs). Toilet Roll Brand # 2 was branded with trees. Or at least with the fact that two trees were planted for every pack that was sold. I don’t know if there were trees on the packaging because I never bought any of it; but I don’t believe that there were.

I think the Products were all made at the same Toilet Roll Factory in or near Cottonopolis, in The North of England. But the trees that the British people ultimately wiped their bums with probably came from Scandinavia. Never mind: there was to be no talk of Supply Chains or bum-wiping on the Facebook pages! Nobody needed to know or think about where the Toilet Rolls came from. And if you thought that the Facebook pages of major Toilet Roll brands would be awash with discussions of the Craft of bum-wiping, you’d be wrong, Prospective Employer. There was to be no mention of that whatsoever from me as the community manager; and neither would there be any tolerance of bumspeak by The Community. To my utter bafflement, in all my time on The Toilet Rolls Job I never had to delete a single comment for making even the most passing reference to the removal of fæcal matter from a befouled anus using tissue torn from a toilet roll tube. In the few short years since Brand Facebook Pages for Toilet Rolls had become A Thing, those members of the public who chose to spend their Time writing things on them (mostly middle-aged mums and teenage boys, I found) seemed to favour innocuous comments expressing their Brand Loyalty—presumably in the hope of receiving Free Toilet Rolls; which would not, under my jurisdiction, be forthcoming. Not least because I had no personal access to the Product (and, for my part, I invariably bought supermarket own-brand loo roll, or whatever else was cheapest by volume while On Offer). Besides which, I was under no instructions from my employer or theirs to use my position of relative power to reward any such entreating behaviour.

My time on this Job was to be split equally between the Facebook pages of the two different Toilet Roll Brands. Which seemed fair. There would be more to do for Toilet-Roll Brand # 1, but the Work was easier. Toilet-Roll Brand # 1 was rolling out a Content Marketing Campaign via YouTube and Facebook, featuring an animated children’s story starring its adorable animal mascot (AAM), the exact nature of which I cannot specify so as to protect his or her or its or their identity. Suffice to say that A Successful Children’s Book Author had been enlisted to storyboard a 12-episode story about the AAM (adorable animal mascot). (Although not that successful a children’s book author, implicitly.) The story, such as it was, was okay; but the facts that each episode was only a couple of minutes long and that each episode was released monthly did make the narrative, much like this sentence, and much like this Curriculum Vitæ, I suspect, quite hard to follow. Even for somebody like me who was intimately involved with the story to the point of deconstructing every episode to try to drag enough Content from it to last for a month(’s worth of Facebook posts). Alas, no matter how hard we tried, none of this expensive Branded Content could ever hope to compete for likes and shares with the pictures of the real-life adorable animals on which the AAM was based—which I was both able and willing to cadge from Wikimedia Commons. The defined target audience of “funny mummies” just loved adorable animals. But they only liked our AAM-derived Content Marketing.

Toilet-Roll Brand # 2’s Content was more difficult, but more personally rewarding. I was given precisely Jack Shit to Work with, except the constant promise (or threat?) that for every tree’s worth of loo roll The Great British Public bought and wiped their bums with, two trees would be planted in its or their place. Let’s momentarily leave aside The Obvious Fact that it’s impossible to “plant a tree” to replace a tree—because you plant seeds or saplings, not trees; and the vast majority of the seeds and saplings you plant will die long before they get anywhere near the size of the sort of tree you might harvest for turning into shit-rags. The whole Concept was obviously Nonsense too; because in order to maintain a Profitable Toilet Roll Business you fucking obviously have to plant a fuck of a lot more “trees” than you harvest, or you’ll soon end up with none to rip apart to reconstitute into anus-towels. Beyond this, I wondered: where exactly in Scandinavia were these vast swatches of deforested plains just waiting to be refilled with lush and verdant Silvicultural Product? And what would actually happen if every time someone wiped shit from their arse with a slightly-upmarket-of-animal-themed branded bog-roll the amount of trees on the fucking planet doubled? How long before we were all impaled upon the razor-sharp black-metal-band-name-logo limbs of an unforgiving Norway Spruce?

As you can tell, Prospective Employer, I didn’t give the matter much thought. I just got on with my Job; which, as I understood it—although it was never described to me as such—was to fill Toilet Roll Brand # 2’s Facebook page with the most Fascinating Facts I could find on Wikipedia about trees. So I did that. I have no idea whether Toilet-Roll Brand # 2’s Facebook page is still used for this purpose—or whether it exists at all—because I left Facebook in May 2016 when it became apparent there was a robot on there impersonating me, and Mark Zuckerberg’s customer-service robot (AKA Nick Clegg) didn’t give a damn.

I learnt a lot about trees during The Toilet Rolls Job. And I based most of the Content around notable trees of the world. I learnt that probably the heaviest living thing on our planet is a clonal colony of quaking aspen trees in North America—which is thought to have a shared underground root system up to tens of thousands of years old—and it’s collectively called “Pando” which means “I spread” in Latin. It’s in Utah. I also learnt of the Tree of Ténéré: a solitary acacia in the Sahara in Niger that grew right in the middle of a vast expanse of level desert, and served for many years as a landmark on caravan routes—until it was knocked down in 1973 by a drunk truck-driver.

But I learnt little that might help me in my future Working Life. I’d suspected for some time that I’d learnt as much as I (or anyone) could from the process of Social Media Community Management. As for Ad Agency # 1… well, although I was Working with completely different Colleagues during this Remote stint, the general vibe of frustration, acrimony and rudeness still managed to find its way into my Life—if only in the tone of the emails my main Account contact sent me.

Good Job or Bad Job?

The curse of the Remote Worker is the struggle for Solidarity. The Remote Freelancer all the more so. My one Agency contact was a miserable git; but so I had discovered were all of the Account people at Agency # 1 if they’d stayed there long enough. She was, from what I could gather, Overworked and Jaded, but basically Functional. The Brand Managers for the two Toilet Roll brands at The Client’s Office, Up North, were okay. Both were young females who couldn't have been long out of short trousers or whatever such people wear as children in that climate. One was friendly and put smiley faces in emails. The other wasn’t and didn’t. It made little difference to me, ultimately.

I had one in-person meeting in the entire duration of this part-time contract job. I had to get a train to an airport in Cottonopolis, which took all day, for a two-hour meeting in a rented office block near to the airport to which a large number of office bods from the toilet-roll client and a handful from the Great Wen-based agency had been summoned by my account contact. My role was to present a couple of slides of numbers from the social media pages; which could have been just as easily ignored if sent as an attachment to an email. (In fact, from my point of view, much more easily.) The only response my input solicited from anyone there was the pretty much universal utter incredulity upon their receiving the news that I'd travelled to the meeting from West Wales. People lived there?! And they were allowed on Facebook?! Fuck. (Or, I suppose, possibly "fook".)

The Company quite sensibly decided to bring community-management In-House so they could pay a Cheaper, more Junior person Up North to do it. I’d seen this coming from the beginning. There was a very finite lifespan to the ill-judged Content Marketing plan for Toilet Roll Brand # 1. And having been asked numerous times for Ideas for future Facebook-page content, I’d suggested a six-month Content Strategy for Toilet Roll Brand # 2 involving a crowdsourced photography competition themed around trees, with the possibility of getting “your photograph on a pack” at the end. But this was Beyond My Brief, involving as it did Legal issues, Brand repercussions, and a presumably very expensive alteration to the Packaging Manufacture Process. When they said “ideas” they meant ways to convince The Client to extend their Contracts with Ad Agency # 1 for Management of the Facebook pages without incurring any costs to The Agency or The Client; and without me charging them any extra hours for the Time it took me to come up with said Ideas. 

I might have suggested that there was no pressing need in The Universe for more Toilet-Roll-Themed Facebook Content; or that the scope for the exploration of ideas pertaining to the aforementioned became incredibly narrow once you ruled out the manufacturing process, the supply chain, the product itself and its intended use, not to mention the crowdsourcing of brand-relevant content. For Toilet Roll Brand # 1 you could at least post a copyright-free image of a cute animal once or twice a week. But for Brand # 2, the only post over the entire five-month period that had any significant engagement whatsoever was an entirely irrelevant and off-brand Competition To Win an iPad. It wasn’t even related to Toilet Roll, as it was being used to promote a tangentially affiliated facial tissue Product. (A facial tissue, Prospective Employer, being an entirely different thing from an anal tissue.)

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that I Produced nothing of value over the entirety of this Job, because that was exactly what I was being Paid to do. Not every Job can be inherently Productive, Prospective Employer; at least not in terms that I can recognize. This was a Job that existed so a Job could exist, as were the Jobs of pretty much everybody I had dealings with over the course of it. Regardless of the wiping of bums with paper—which I don’t consider to be an inherently Undignified Activity; rather the opposite actually—our Jobs, when compared with the many other Jobs implicitly required to turn trees into sewage, were all Unproductive, Undignified, and—at least in my case—devoid of Solidarity.

So it might have paid the bills, and it might have been easy money, but it was unambiguously A Bad Job.

[Next chapter next month y'all.]